For more on Human-Centred Education, please see Rethinking Secondary Education: A Human-Centred Approach by Scherto Gill & Garrett Thomson, published by Pearson Education in 2012. This book articulates and develops a human-centred vision from conceptual perspectives. These theories form the philosophical …

A human-centred school is a community of learners. This idea involves a radical reframing of what a school is. This reframing is required in order for the human-centred approaches to curriculum, pedagogy and learning feedback and review to reinforce each …

The Learning Mentor works with the student on one-to-one level. There are broadly five key aspects to the work of mentoring: Getting to know the student (1) getting to know the student’s background (eg, life history) (2) understanding the student’s …

Feedback for students has three essential features. Student responsibility. Holistic development. Understanding what is good work and how to improve. Non-judgemental improvement with critical self-reflection.

Introduction

Human-Centred Education (HCE) respects the whole human beings in all educative processes. HCE radically rethinks the aims of education, the nature of learning and the relationships between students, teachers, school administrators, parents and other stakeholders in the learning community.

Human-Centred Education intends to build a bridge between, on the one hand, the ever-changing principles and policies of state secondary education in England and beyond, and on the other, the myriad forms of alternative or progressive education. HCE is not a simple synthesis of both traditions, instead, we have been both critical and appreciative with regard to different forms of education, whilst recognising that romanticism and cynicism are equal failures to wed vision with reality.

In working on the values and concerns that ideally ought to motivate a secondary educational system, we found that the phrase ‘human-centred education’ captured the essential meanings at the core of our thoughts, and distilled the innovative practices that we had observed. However, in adopting the phrase of ‘human-centred’ is by no means to suggest homocentricity. It is therefore important for us to clarify that human-centred education focuses on cultivating those qualities that can be described as human, such as interest, curiosity, care, responsibility, persistence and so forth.

National education policies tend to ignore deeper educational processes, such as the cultivation of qualities that are central to living meaningfully and well, because they solely focus on high-stakes testing of academic performance. In this way, HCE provides an effective antidote to an obsession with testing, and brings to the fore a holistic well-being oriented approach without sacrificing educational standards and school’s interests in academic excellence. In fact, as our current pilot case study shows, the more a school adopts a human-centred approach to teaching and learning, the more the students can aspire to unfold their holistic potential.

For more information on how to integrate Human-Centred Education in your schools or learning centres, please contactus.